Cargoes for Crusoes

by Grant M. Overton

i

If only books were like hats and gowns it would simplify matters a good deal. I could say: “Ostrich feathers are being much used,” or “Egotism is usually the center of the design.” But although there is an observable tendency to buy books like clothes, because some novel or other is all the rage, the tendency grows weaker from year to year, I think; and if in the title of this chapter I use the word “mode” it is phrasemaking.

Phrasemaking has its excuse in convenience, but it must be abandoned in the discussion of some of the fiction I am going to talk about. Among these books just one is a first novel. Because it has this distinction, because of its human quality, and because it borders a theme of great significance, I want to speak at once of Marjorie Barkley McClure’s High Fires. Mrs. McClure, the daughter of a Detroit clergyman, has laid her story principally in that city, in the period from 1905 to about the present. Angus Stevenson is a minister of the gospel who sticks by the letter of a somewhat rigid, old-fashioned creed. His sons and his daughter are young people of today. They cannot see why they should not do what other boys and girls of their age are doing. But their father will not for one moment countenance such things as dancing and card-playing and Sunday baseball.

The struggle is tempered and made human by Angus Stevenson’s goodness. He loves his children; especially is his daughter the apple of his eye. But he cannot sacrifice one inch of his principles. They are just as effectual in one direction as another. He voluntarily reduces his own salary when it seems to him that the act is called for. If he is intolerant, he is Christ-like.

Of several crises, the one that cuts into him most deeply is his daughter’s falling in love with a young man whom Angus Stevenson is constrained to regard as an atheist and an infidel. I have said that he loves his children; I should add that even when they are most rebellious against their father, they love him no less. The intensity and depth of Mrs. McClure’s portrait of Angus Stevenson fully realizes the feeling on all sides. You are made to see and to acknowledge the claim to justice of conflicting creeds, the rare courage and noble faith and life-long devotion of the father, the right to happiness and a certain self-fulfillment of the children. I know scarcely a novel of this year in which the human element is so strong; none in which it is stronger; none in which the lessons of a right feeling are more clearly conveyed or are more capable of a direct application in the lives of ordinary Americans.

Here lies the flesh that tried

To follow the spirit’s leading;

Fallen at last, it died,

Broken, bruised and bleeding,

Burned by the high fires

Of the spirit’s desires.

Mrs. McClure’s novel is of interest, too, for its evidence that religion is quickening in the American mind. I am using “religion” in the sense of personal faith, which is at the present hour having a difficult time with established creeds, on the one hand, and life’s machinery of motion on the other. There were evidences before High Fires was published, in the huge sale of a new life of Christ and in the fundamentalist-liberal controversy in the churches, that something deeply disquieting was coming to the surface. Almost simultaneously with the publication of High Fires, a first novel by Lyon Montross, Half Gods, by means of the highly realistic presentation of American small town life, tried to disclose the trouble. Mr. Montross’s story implied what is probably true: the wine of a strong belief in anything is no longer fermented in most of us; we half-worship, or, at best, only worship half-heartedly.

Now the business of a novelist, or his art, is, as Joseph Conrad said, “a form of imagined life clearer than reality.” It is to show you something more plainly than life shows it you; a good novel is a beacon, not a bonfire. Thus in the new novel by Margaret Culkin Banning (the most ambitious work she has so far done), the heroine, after a life of vicissitudes, comes to realize that she is, in the Scriptural phrase of the title, but a “handmaid of the Lord.” Veronica is a sensitive girl brought up in depressing though scarcely unusual circumstances. She marries a man whose business career takes her to a social height, both in America and, for a time, in England. Her church, which should mean so much to her constantly, affects her life only at intervals. When the crash comes she finds herself separated from her husband by his struggle to keep afloat. She goes back to her home town. It seems as though she were back where she had started, with little difference except in the perplexity of an uncomprehended experience. So it is that finally she comes to a measure of understanding, to an unquiet peace. She sees that things will go on, though not in her way nor in any way of her choosing. A Handmaid of the Lord, like High Fires and Half Gods, does something to get at the trouble that is in us.

To show what is, including what is wrong, is the novelist’s object; to show what came right is also sometimes possible. Dealing with the subject of religion, it has taken that very able novelist, Compton Mackenzie, three books in sequence to show the history of Mark Lidderdale. The Altar Steps gave the young man’s background and the story of his life up to his ordination in the Church of England. In The Parson’s Progress we see him as a priest of the English Church constantly beset by doubts and difficulties. These are by no means solved when the third novel of the trilogy, The Heavenly Ladder, opens; but they find their solution as it ends. Mark, as a convert in Rome, finds a happiness that Mr. Mackenzie has expressed with the utmost simplicity and with a restrained but lofty fervor.

With a simplicity different but equally honest, Ralph Connor writes his novels of men in a newer country. “Imagine,” he said, when asked to tell briefly about his new book, “a man of vitality and power who has given and taken heavy blows in the struggle of human life, who finds himself cornered by forces he cannot subdue. Suddenly he realizes that his back is against the wall, that no further retreat is possible. Spiritually, mentally, physically there is a last stand to be made—a hold on the essentials of life to be groped for and seized. It is this last stand, this fighting chance that I have made the theme of Treading the Winepress.” The scenes of the story are laid in Nova Scotia.